It is often claimed that the Ancient Greeks were the first to identify objects that have no size, yet are able to build up the world around us through their interactions. And as we are able to observe th ...

The world's largest science experiment, the Large Hadron Collider, has potentially delivered one of physics' "Holy Grails" in the form of the Higgs boson. Much of the science came down to one number – 126, the ...

(Phys.org)—It was a very busy week for physics research. A team of scientists has set a quantum speed limit—the group at the University of California found a way to prove a fundamental relationship between en ...

Some physical principles have been considered immutable since the time of Isaac Newton: Light always travels in straight lines. No physical object can change its speed unless some outside force acts on it.

Billions upon billions of neutrinos speed harmlessly through everyone's body every moment of the day, according to cosmologists. The bulk of these subatomic particles are believed to come straight from the ...

It was a good week for physics as one team of researchers set a world record for a compact 'tabletop' particle accelerator—they used one of the most powerful lasers in existence to accelerate subatomic parti ...

The American Physical Society (APS) and the American Institute of Physics (AIP) announced today, on behalf of the Heineman Foundation for Research, Educational, Charitable, and Scientific Purposes, that theoretical physicist ...

It was another banner week for physics as the Nobel Prize in physics was announced—Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura shared the prize for their work in inventing a new kind of LED. Also, myster ...

(Phys.org) —It was a breakthrough with profound implications for the world as we know it: the Higgs boson, the elementary particle that gives all other particles their mass, discovered at the Large Hadron ...

Darkside Scientific recently drew a lot of gazes its way in its video release of a car treated to the company's electroluminescent paint called LumiLor. Electroluminescence (EL) is a characteristic of a material ...

What causes a proton to spin? This fundamental question has been a longstanding mystery in particle physics, although it was once thought that the answer would be fairly straightforward: The spin of a proton's ...

Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland and even in the fictional world of CBS' "The Big Bang Theory" look to subatomic particles called neutrinos to answer the big questions about the universe.

Last year, a monster magnet set out from Brookhaven National Lab on an epic, 35-day trek by land and sea to its new home at Fermilab, where it will serve as the heart of a search for evidence of new subatomic ...

Subatomic particle

In physics, subatomic particles are the particles composing nucleons and atoms. There are two types of subatomic particles: elementary particles, which are not made of other particles, and composite particles. Particle physics and nuclear physics study these particles and how they interact.

Elementary particles of the Standard Model include:

Composite subatomic particles (such as protons or atomic nuclei) are bound states of two or more elementary particles. For example, a proton is made of two up quarks and one down quark, while the atomic nuclei of helium-4 is composed of two protons and two neutrons. Composite particles include all hadrons. These, in turn, are composed of baryons (e.g., protons and neutrons) and mesons (e.g., pions and kaons).

There are hundreds of known subatomic particles. Most are either the result of cosmic rays interacting with matter, or have been produced by scattering processes in particle accelerators.[citation needed]